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Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Feb. 4th through Feb. 10th

Welcome to The Moose Pond! The Welcomings posts give the Moose, old and new, a place to visit and share words about the weather, life, the world at large and the small parts of Moosylvania that we each inhabit.

Welcomings will be posted at the start of each week (every Sunday morning). To find the posts, just bookmark this link and Voila! (which is Moose for “I found everyone!!”).

The format is simple: each day, the first moose to arrive on-line will post a comment welcoming the new day and complaining (or bragging!) about their weather. Or mentioning an interesting or thought provoking news item. Or simply checking in.

So … what’s going on in your part of Moosylvania?

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NOTE: The comments page will now split off after 20 or so left margin comments with the most recent comments on the current page. To see the older comments, scroll to the bottom of the page and use the link.

42 windchill 36 and heading for mid 50s – very overcast right now. I hope but doubt it will clear off as we’ve got a front coming in. We got 11.4 KWHs yesterday, the m-t-d is 68. Gonna have to get a bunch of 12s or better to make the 300 February goal. Not impossible but also not likely.

Welp, I’m glad the budget passed – we got some good stuff in it – but really hope we can find a way to protect the Dreamers from the “make America white” crowd. I’m not gonna say “again” because it never was. Evil Ones are gonna do evil every chance they get. We have to get strong enough and powerful enough to drastically limit the number of chances they get.

My friend is doing much better – doctor released her to full time next week, half days for yesterday and today but the wonderful, caring dept chair told her to stay home until Monday. Fortunately she’s got the accrued sick leave to cover 14 days of no work. There are some very good things about working in the public sector and accruable sick leave that rolls from year to year is one of them. 14 days is more time than a 12-years-with-the-company secretary in the private sector (around here anyway) would have using both sick leave and vacation. But at the university while she’s wiped what she had accrued from previous years she still has her vacation for emergencies – and accrues 8 hours sick leave and 14 hours vacation per month with the February and succeeding payrolls.

Need to do my tour of the internets and get a few tweets out then call my congresscritters. And coffee. Also need to do my grocery shopping and schlep some more firewood on the porch before the cold and possible wintry mix hits tomorrow. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

Good morning, 45 and cloudy in Bellingham. I’ve got a busy day ahead and given my slow start I’m going to run out of steam before I accomplish most of what I want to. Oh well, that seems to be my new normal.

I got most of my desk work done yesterday and the rest is in labeled stacks with the hope that I’ll remember what I need to do when I get back to doing it! Today’s focus is food and flowers for tomorrows birthday lunch. It’s just family, but 10 people means it’s more fun if I’ve done prep work ahead of time. My sons want to cook with me on Saturday morning so that means some chaos, but being together in the kitchen is worth the added confusion.

Governor Doodiehead of Wisconsin doesn’t care what Democrats think about elections – and his caucus is happy to ignore that some legislative districts won’t have any representation for over a year. They think that if they wait it out, people will forget that they are angry about the awful Republican brand. Good luck with that. Their flouting of democratic norms will likely become a campaign issue – we will make sure everyone knows.

Great video on Early Briton! I love how they packaged it as an eyepoke to white supremacists. We were watching the Olympics opening ceremony (on tape delay) last night and my daughter kept saying “look at all the WHITE people!” when they showed the Nordic and Eastern European countries. She also noticed that many countries are pretty much only one race (many of the Asian countries) and we got to have a discussion about the United States and how there is no “American Race” but a melting pot of different races. Pushing for “racial purity” makes more sense in Norway and Poland than it does here. But, hey, facts are tricky things!

Denise, will look forward to your PR posts. Thanks for showing us the picture of Cheddar George, one of the first Britons, with his blue eyes and dark skin. For years I had a pet theory that the “Little Dark People” of Rosemary Sutcliffe’s entrancing novels of prehistoric and Roman Britain were the descendants of Minoan refugees fleeing the Great Cataclysm in 1650 B.C. This new information disposes of that little theory, but it was fun while it lasted.

If I ever finish Iron and Scarlet, set in Roman Britain in the year 140 A.D., the Little Dark People will be in it.

You can post the link to the tweet (right click and grab this) but some people can’t view them. It is not technically a YouTube, it is a Twitter video at this point. However, you can go to the AJPlus website and look through their YouTubes (it isn’t there yet) or you can go directly to their Facebook page at : Facebook – AJPlus English and do a Share if it is posted there.

I wish there were a way to turn Twitter videos into YouTubes but if it exists, I have not found it yet.

It is 7 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 16. Cloudy this morning with periods of sun then cloudy again tonight. Flurries are in the forecast for overnight. We had about 6 inches of snow overnight on Thursday and it landed at just the right time to cause most area schools to cancel classes on Friday. Most of my clients across southern Wisconsin closed so that made it a quiet day.

The resignation of Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand is troubling. I don’t blame her for wanting to bail out but I wonder if leaving now is because she has gotten wind of the firing of Rod Rosenstein and either does not want to be in charge of the Special Counsel investigation or doesn’t want to be the person having to fire Mueller or quit. It probably looks better on your resume to have left for a better job.

Scanning the news – I really don’t care if John Kelly stays or goes; does anyone really think that anyone agreeing to work in the yaministration would be less racist and less misogynistic than him? The rot is at the top, it does not matter who is in charge of tRump’s calendar and hands him pens. And anyone who thought that the Trump Administration was going to release the Schiff memo is on serious mind-altering drugs. I am glad – the Nunes memo needs to be relegated to the last news cycle and does not need another chance to gain adherents.

The Democratic Party Weekly Address is related to infrastructure. Of course, now there is no money for roads and bridges and what is being proposed is that the states come up with the money and the federal government will say “good job!” If “starve the beast” were not already causing serious problems for Wisconsin roads, I would be laughing at Gov. Doofus Walker’s look of surprise when he found out that the federal money he was relying on won’t be there. Roads may very well be a campaign issue in the fall but the problem is that Republicans won’t raise any taxes, not even the gas tax which is essentially a user fee for roads. So they are left with business crippling toll roads as their only way out of the Grover Norquist conundrum they are in. They cut taxes to the bone and now there is no money for essential services. Who could have predicted that??

I’m only going to do part of today’s training ride, it’s too long for me & I can’t keep up. They are going to ride through my neighborhood so I’ll do that part. And I have a visit to Min this afternoon. Thawing next week’s oatmeal & lunch. It’s 60 degrees & foggy; so long sleeves but I know it’s nicer weather than a lot of people have.

Good morning, Meese! The sky outside at nearly 9 looks like gray scrambled eggs. There must have been a passing shower during the night because there are wet spots on the road. We’re expecting major rain today and tomorrow. Current temp. here in NoVa is 38 F., going up to 50 F. Not bad, considering what it has been.

Tonight we dine with a dear friend; tomorrow will be a slow cooker pot-roast-with- vegetables day. And perhaps an apple crumble if I feel up to it.

Honestly, after reading about the awfulness of the Thing administration and the shenanigans of the Rethug-controlled Virginia legislature (“No approval of the ERA amendment for YOU, girls—back to your kitchens”), I feel like doing Something Terrible. It involves obtaining a page-sized piece of metal, inscribing the names of the Rethug Evildoers on it, adding a few choice curses, and dropping the curse tablet into the nearest well in the hope that the Goddess Coventina will smite them all. However, I live in the suburbs, so there is no well to be found.

Our local grocery store, which likes to celebrate all holidays two months early, had hot cross buns for sale yesterday! I heated them gently this morning and we enjoyed them with coffee.

Lots to do before we go out tonight, so I’d better hop to it. Hope everyone has a peaceful Saturday!

“[O]btaining a page-sized piece of metal, inscribing the names of the Rethug Evildoers on it, adding a few choice curses, and dropping the curse tablet into the nearest well in the hope that the Goddess Coventina will smite them all. However, I live in the suburbs, so there is no well to be found. However, I live in the suburbs, so there is no well to be found.“

This sounds very promising but the lack of a well has probably saved you from a serious bending of the Wiccan Rede. :)

{{{Diana}}} – well they’d see a lot wrong with “render them harmless” – they feed off pain and if they couldn’t cause any they’d be stuck with the common garden variety of ordinary pains in this life. When in power they are rich men feasting on a surfeit of delicacies – rendered harmless they are working stiffs eating a sufficiency of homy but carb-heavy (potatoes, rice, etc) meals like the farmers and blue-collar folks always have.

29 windchill 22 and very overcast with a bit of drizzle. There’s enough light that the PV system is actually on but that’s about all you can say for it. Glad I did my grocery shopping yesterday as the light’s too iffy for me to safely drive. Got 8.9 KWHs yesterday bringing the m-t-d to 77 – and if we manage to get it to 80 today I’ll be surprised. It’s dark and damp which makes it feel chilly – well, with the Raynaud’s it is chilly to me – even with the furnace set at 66 my hands and feet feel like ice cubes and hurt. I’ve been living with it during the day and only doing fires in the evening to conserve my firewood but I may go ahead and build a fire anyway today (and probably tomorrow) – and just hope I can manage to contact my firewood supplier. His “money-maker” is the fancy restaurants and he’s been so busy all calls go to a full voicemail box. (Sort of like my congresscritters there.) But I do have the money to buy another cord so I just have to reach him to do it.

Evil Ones being evil. Nothing new. What’s hitting twitter is details – the concept hasn’t changed at all. Dominant Culture making damned-sure it stays dominant and happily killing people to do it. Feature not a bug. So we do our best to use the laws, not break them, to get back into power and undo as much of the damage as possible, create more and better pathways to the dream of America that had never existed – but can.

Need to tour the internets then do a bit of stuff around the house. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

Good morning, 31 and sunny in Bellingham. The internet is magic, but a connection is needed! We lost ours last night and thanks to my MIFI device I was able to get help restoring it this morning. It was a frustrating process though as the box I was trying to type in was not fully on my screen, but I persisted and the chat agent was patient. So magic is restored.

I filled the dining room with tulips yesterday and da boys will be here soon to start cooking. We’re making a french potato salad (mostly potatoes and herbs), green beans with heirloom cherry tomatoes (fancy words for multicolored tomatoes), grilled steaks with herb butter, and a german chocolate cake. Happy birthday RonK!

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